Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less

How do you cut through the noise, commotion, and bad information that is right now cluttering up your customers' digital space? Epic Content Marketing. One of the world's leading experts on content marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains how to draw prospects and customers in by creating information and content they actually want to engage with. No longer can we interrupt our customers with mediocre content (and sales messages) our customers don't care about. Epic Content Marketing takes you step by step through the process of developing stories that inform and entertain and compel customers to act - without actually telling them to.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hook Model," a four steps process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is a guide to building products people can't put down.

Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update.

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

When it comes to delivering a pitch, Oren Klaff has unparalleled credentials. Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a-kind method to raise more than $400 million - and now, for the first time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation. Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas. According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn’t an art - it’s a simple science.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last? Face it, the checklist of tired P's marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed - Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few - aren't working anymore.

Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing

Brainfluence explains how to practically apply neuroscience and behavior technology and behavior research to better market to consumers by understanding their decision patterns. This application, called neuromarketing, studies the way the brain responds to various cognitive and sensory marketing stimuli. Analysts use this to measure a consumer's preference, what a customer reacts to, and why consumers make certain decisions.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

The benchmark guide to marketing and PR, updated with the latest social media and marketing trends, tools, and real-world examples of success The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition is the pioneering guide to the future of marketing, an international best seller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages. It offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales.

Amazon Customer says:"This is such a great book I'm giving up a Secret"

All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World

Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better, and look cooler, than $20 no-names...and believing it makes it true.

Unmarketing: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging

For generations, marketing has been hypocritical. We've been taught to market to others in ways we hate being marketed to. So why do we still keep trying the same stale marketing moves? UnMarketing shows you how to unlearn the old ways and consistently attract and engage the right customers. You'll stop just pushing out your message and praying that it sticks somewhere....

The Advertising Effect

In The Advertising Effect, respected advertising insider, Adam Ferrier, reveals the ten techniques used by some of the best-known brands across the globe. These techniques are grounded in psychological theory with award winning real world examples and explore how the most effective way to change behaviour is through action rather than the conventional advertising practices (emotional or rational persuasion).

Influence: Science and Practice, ePub, 5th Edition

Widely used in classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the listener of the power of persuasion. Cialdini organizes compliance techniques into six categories based on psychological principles that direct human behavior: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

Dubito Ergo Sum says:"This book will change the way you see the world."

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

"You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me. I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs—as much as any one person can."

Scrum

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1200 percent. Scrum (which gets its name from the formation in rugby in which the whole team locks its arms to gain control of the ball) is the reason that Amazon can launch a new feature on its website every day.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Leap First: Creating Work That Matters

Recorded in an intimate gathering of aspiring entrepreneurs, writers, and leaders, Leap First teaches us 49 essential principles, practices, and life lessons that have helped Seth the most in his own work and life. More than an audiobook or keynote speech, each track here presents a carefully chosen catalyst intended to trigger our own passion and insight with each listening.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...Create a Mass of Raving Fans...and Take Any Business to the Next Level

The "mind-reading" system that is revolutionizing online business. Do you know how to find out what people really want to buy? (Not what you think they want, not what they say they want, but what they really want?) The secret is asking the right questions - and the right questions are not what you might expect. Ask is based on the compelling premise that you should never have to guess what your prospects and customers are thinking.

Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a "viral loop" - to use the product means having to share it with others. After all, what's the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The end result is a business that spreads rapidly, scales quickly, and has the promise to create staggering wealth.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift, and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of repeat business? The secret--no matter what industry you're in--is finding and keeping automatic customers. These days virtually anything you need can be purchased through a subscription, with more convenience than ever before.

Publisher's Summary

Why do certain products and ideas go viral? Dynamic young Wharton professor Jonah Berger draws on his research to explain the six steps that make products or ideas contagious.

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective.

Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Contagious is filled with fascinating information drawn from Berger's research. You will be surprised to learn, for example, just how little word of mouth is generated online versus elsewhere. Already praised by Dan Ariely and Dan Gilbert, and sold in nine countries, this book is a must-listen for people who want their projects and ideas to succeed.

This is a must-read for anyone professionally involved in the creation of advertising. It's written for people without background on the subject, but does such a good job in organizing and clarifying the principles that it's a good read for even marketing veterans.

Berger does an excellent job exploring and detailing the message elements that cause people to remember advertising messages and stories, and to want to pass around those stories (with or without embedded ad messages). The book explores 6 principles involved in why things catch on:

This book is a great one-- I think it has more content than "The Tipping Point" from Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm's explanation why things become popular or viral is because of weak ties... But Contagious goes deeper-- Jonah Berger finds 6 reasons. And it all makes sense. Very well written and with a great performance by Keith Nobbs.I bought this book to my father and brother and they are liking it.Read it, and you will like it too.

Berger does a great job of breaking down the various elements that when working together, create a contagious effect. He then provides a recipe for maximizing the chance that your initiative will be contagious. Super narration and fast listen.

I find that some of the case studies that were reffered to as evidence for his points were effective but at times lend themselves to other intrepretations from a marketing perspective which leaves doubt as to what really causes something to be contagious.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Taking on this question, whethere or not he is right or wrong is what makes it interesting. there isn`t much solid evidence or a clear reasoning for why something becomes contagious so it is a brave effort on his part to theorize in a book.

Did Contagious inspire you to do anything?

No. I feel like there are little nuggets of information which are useful but nothing mindblowing enough to make me incorporate it into my work and daily life as a marketer.

...while Berger does a godly job of outlining what I'm sure are some -- certainly not all -- of the finer points of "Why Things Catch On," I have a couple of gripes.

First, the book is too short. In the end, I felt like I'd just read a long essay rather than a book of substance. Sure the content gave me something to chew on but would it have killed the author to include more real world cases?

Did Keith Nobbs, the narrator, have a cold while reading this? Did he mispronounce some words? I can't be 100% sure until I read the text myself, but it seemed that way. Hey, nobody's perfect but I did rate the performance 4/5 stars. Overall, Nobbs did well.

Other than that, great book. It almost didn't feel like I was reading something from the self help section!

This is everything I hoped it would be. The information is solid and the presentation is very well done. If I have any issues it's that I didn't finish the book feeling like I had a great grasp on the techniques he talks about in the book. I'd love to see a PDF with some of it outlined like they have for other books. Just some cheat sheets and bullet points would be fine.

I work in the area of creative commerce and nearly all of the points made in this book about stickiness and compelling content on the internet were true 20 years ago in other media. The rules of engagement with consumers and audiences have not changed. Just the battlefield has. This alone is good to know, but does not justify the time one must dedicate to listening to this piece — a mixed bag, from which I'm not sure I gleaned many points that I can use in my daily work. It's just more of the same old pseudo-experts attempting to write "rules" on how creative people catch lightning in a bottle. Creative people, on the other hand, do not need those rules, as they know innately how to compel.

The Tipping Point. It's like the sequel to the Tipping Point, which I also enjoyed.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

Social Currency. I love that expression.

Any additional comments?

The narration blends very well with the content to the point the narrator sounds like he is the author. The book is a collection of lessons framed in stories that have practical application for just about any business. This is the first book that anyone of ambition should read or listen to. I've listened to it twice and will listen to it again in the future I'm sure.

although seemingly interesting throughout listening, in hindsight very few points are really highlighted, and of those most are not original insights

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Russell tolliday

6/14/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Amazing! Essential for entrepreneurs!"

This book is incredible, if you're running your own business or trying to promote anything you HAVE to read this book.

It starts with laying the terminology that will be used in the book and then builds and builds with examples that you can apply to your project straight away.

Also it's so enjoyable and interesting, I listened effortlessly and enjoyed every second. A must must read!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Alex M

Buckinghamshire

4/16/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Refreshing"

Contagious stood out for me. I've read a tonne of books, often left disappointed with the rehashed content. Contagious has modern and interesting examples and gives a practical recipe for giving your idea every chance of success, all whilst keeping it simple. Well worth the money. Enjoy!

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Sam

United Kingdom

2/26/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Best read of the year"

A must for those interested in marketing and communication. Up to date, scientific and beautifully written.

I will be re reading it again soon!

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

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